real-world language learning

LEARN ENGLISH IN THE UK! 

Now that the UK and Germany have committed to a school group travel arrangement after English UK secured visa-free travel for German school groups, there are now more opportunities for face-to-face learning in an English-speaking environment.

But how important is so-called real-world language learning?

LEARNING A LANGUAGE AS A LIFE-LEARNING SKILL:

A new campaign has been launched to make it a reality for young people:

The core message of the campaign is to create FOMO (fear of missing out) among young people, especially Gen Z. It positions language travel not merely as academic study, but as a transformative life experience. This includes making memories, building global friendships, and experiencing diverse cultures first-hand, directly contrasting with online-only learning. The strategy involves a global movement primarily on TikTok and Instagram, platforms where the target demographic is most active. The goal is to make language and educational travel a trending topic, drawing inspiration from successful destination campaigns.

The organisation ALTO is a global platform for leaders and decision makers within the language and educational travel industry - and ALTO launched its student social media campaign earlier in the year.

Here's more from the study travel industry, as ALTO launches its campaign:

Industry association ALTO has launched a new global social media campaign inviting students to share their experiences of studying abroad and inspire a new generation of language travellers. The ALTO #PassportToPeople campaign was described as a "a global call to celebrate real-life language and educational travel".

ALTO Where Leaders Meet said, “Aimed at encouraging language learning, international friendships, and meaningful cultural exchange, the campaign is designed to inspire a new generation to embrace the life-changing power of travel and studying abroad.”

The association is asking students to capture and share their personal moments, and to post brief, compelling videos or photos on TikTok or Instragram with the #PassportToPeople hashtag to “contribute to a collective story of connection, courage, and cultural discovery”.

REAL-WORLD LANGUAGE LEARNING:

The idea behind getting young people to the UK to learn English and getting them to personalise and directly share their learning experiences is that it's not only more fun but more effective to interact.

As one blogger says, real-life learning is about connecting language to the world:

As a passionate advocate for learner-centred language teaching approaches, I firmly believe that connecting language learning to real-world topics and contexts is the key to learner engagement and fostering life-long learning. If we can show our students how the language they are learning connects to their own everyday lives, and not only that, but also give them opportunities to discuss important topics that they care about, we are setting them on the path towards making English a natural part of their daily life.

The Oxford Uni Press agrees that it's all about bridging the gap - and how real-world connections make learning more meaningful - although this piece is about pushing a new book...

And interestingly, the 'unreal' world of AI is suggesting why real-world applications matter in language education

But to finish, here's another teaching blog looking at how to use real-life scenarios for language learning:

From birth, we naturally absorb the language around us, using it to express thoughts and interact with others. This process, called language acquisition, occurs in real-life situations where understanding is essential. Similarly, you can use real-life scenarios for language learning. Because, when learners engage with the language in authentic, meaningful contexts, it helps them understand and remember it better. This approach builds a stronger vocabulary and grammar foundation. Which helps you to transition from theoretical knowledge to practical, everyday use, making the language feel more intuitive. In this article, we’ll dive into how you can use real-life scenarios to learn a foreign language and boost your confidence while travelling or moving abroad. Let’s get started!

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managed dystopia

The writer of 'Trainspotting' has just given The Interview - Celebrities: 9. Irvine Welsh: The Next Chapter - BBC iPlayer [See from 2:30 minutes, 7.30, 13:30 and 19:00 - and at 14:25 he talks about 'managing dystopia']

This is managed dystopia.

Or, from George Carlin - The American Dream.

Taking us from America to Russia to Ukraine, here's a piece by Paul Mason in the latest The New World

It started on the eve of independence day. In an hour-long phone call with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin told the US president that Russia had played a major role in America’s war of independence, offered to send him a movie about traditional values, chatted about mutually beneficial business ventures… and then flatly insisted that “Russia would strive to achieve its goals” in Ukraine. That night Russian forces staged the biggest strike of the war so far, launching 539 long-range drones and seven ballistic missiles at Kyiv.

This is what's happening in Russia now, in its war on culture:

• Russia’s ‘guardian of traditional values’ How the Kremlin plans to sell Putin to voters in his fifth presidential campaign — Meduza
• ‘It could undermine the traditional family’ Insiders say the Kremlin is keeping an anti-domestic violence law in limbo on purpose. Here’s why. — Meduza
• Russia bans distribution permits for films that discredit ‘traditional values’ — Meduza
• ‘Thrown to the wolves’ How a Texas man moved his family to Russia to escape ‘DEI’ — and ended up on the front lines in Ukraine — Meduza

As predicted in science fiction:

• ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe’: what Blade Runner 2049’s dystopia tells us about 2017 | Blade Runner 2049 | The Guardian
• Blade Runner 2049 review – a gigantic spectacle of pure hallucinatory craziness | Blade Runner 2049 | The Guardian

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what makes a good detective story - it's not the plot

By reading detective stories from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, we enter perhaps the defining world of this genre.

RAYMOND CHANDLER

And the master of the genre was Raymond Chandler, who wrote about the underworld of Los Angeles, but who went to school near London:

It also helps to actually appreciate the richness of the writing style of Raymond Chandler language, in that "the master of hard-boiled detective fiction, is renowned for his distinctive literary style that reshaped the genre".

And the fact that he was educated in England before moving back to the States, means that Chandler’s slang is carefully crafted. And as an 'outsider' in Los Angeles, he challenged the way these stories were traditionally written: "My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description."

Or, as others say on Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, this is what we like about the stories:

It's not the detective plot, [but] the noirish palette to everything, the enviably snappy dialogue, or terse brilliance of Chandler's prose...

This is why his books are so acclaimed - in that Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is in search of dignity:

One of the important aspects spoken about Raymond Chandler’s books is the style of the author. Chandler’s language was tough, he could throw one liners the same way Mike Tyson could throw a knockout punch, the dialog was witty and hard, the characters colorful and the plot convoluted. You did not read Chandler for the plot. (Indeed his plots sometime have holes which even Chandler himself couldn’t fill. When asked as to who killed the driver in ‘The Big Sleep’, Chandler is supposed to have remarked that he had no clue. Or something to that effect.) 

You read Chandler for his style the first time but when you keep returning back to his books, the realization dawns that beyond the style lies Chandler’s moral compass, which ensures the story moves in the right direction. It is this moral center which according to me has given immortality to Chandler’s best books. If there is one theme which seem to hold together the best novels of Chandler: ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘The Long Goodbye’, ‘Farewell My Lovely’ and ‘The High Window’, it is the search for dignity. In all these novels, Marlowe is trying his best to restore the sense of dignity of his client, even if this process hurts him personally sometimes.

BRITISH CRIME FICTION

Shockingly (!) Raymond Chandler took down Sherlock Holmes - that is, "the eccentric sleuths" modeled after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

Their stories go something like this: 

In the traditional Golden Age plot, a murder occurs — but not for any apparent reason beyond puzzle solving. After the discovery of the body (which is almost never found rotting), the private detective arrives on the scene, which is usually somewhere sensational, like a Georgian mansion or a yacht traveling the Nile. From here, suspects are questioned and clues examined. It’s an impersonal affair, almost like moving chess pieces or trying the Sunday crossword. By the end, the detective will assemble all of the concerned parties and explain to them how he or she solved the case with superhuman intelligence and the supernatural power of never being wrong. The criminal is then dramatically outed.

Not that Chandler had anything against chess and problem-solving - as his detective Marlowe enjoyed replaying classic chess games - but he did dislike the escapist lack of realism in classic British detective stories:

“The Simple Art of Murder,” which was first published in The Atlantic in December 1944, is essentially Chandler laying bare the ethos behind hard-boiled detective fiction... For Chandler, the detective novel should be a “realist in murder,” meaning it should inhabit “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities.” ... Chandler expounds upon how detective novels should represent the unsafe world of precarious civilization, not the idealized and contained world of the country house.

Raymond Chandler’s grudge against British mysteries has been reconsidered over the years - a recurring point being that Chandler slammed English detective novels and their authors time and again, but he didn't hate the literature, just the class snobbery.

Perhaps his criticism has been over-interpreted:

“Chandler despised the English school of crime writing,” pronounces the late modern English Crime Queen P. D. James in her short genre survey, Talking about Detective Fiction (2009). Similar pearls of conventional wisdom have been placed before us by authorities who similarly have overgeneralized Chandler’s hostility toward the puzzle-oriented English detective novel. In The Life of Raymond Chandler, for example, Frank MacShane sweepingly refers to “Chandler’s dislike of deductive detective stories,” while in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, the academic scholar Leonard Cassuto categorically declares that “Chandler rejects the puzzle-whodunit.”

It seems that Chandler was a little less brutal:

In analyzing “The Simple Art of Murder” writers tend to focus on Chandler’s criticism of artificiality within the mystery genre, yet in his essay Chandler in fact spends much of his time blasting the classical English detective novel on what clearly are class-related grounds...

Throughout his “Simple Art” essay, Chandler repeatedly sounds cutting class notes. When praising his hard-boiled predecessor Dashiell Hammett for bringing something fundamentally new and bracingly authentic to the detective fiction genre, Chandler tellingly complains of English mystery novelists larding their tales with “dukes and Venetian vases.” In a famous statement, Chandler declares that “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.” Later he lauds Hammett (and by implication himself) for giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.” Elsewhere Chandler sneers at English “detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.”

FRIEDRICH GLAUSER:

The Swiss-German writer Friedrich Glauser is not well-known in the English-speaking world, but the Friedrich-Glauser-Preis has become the most prestigious award for crime fiction in the German-speaking world.

Indeed, much crime fiction in German has been marginalised:

Until relatively recently, German academia had largely ignored their home-grown talent and focused their scholarly efforts instead on the canonical English-language authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. As influential as these writers have been, Hall argues that this is a mistake, as “German-language crime fiction has also been shaped by its own crime writing heritage, for in the case of the early detective story, it was German-speaking crime writers who led the way”.

His English-language publisher says that Friedrich Glauser is "often referred to as the Swiss Simenon":

In 1939, a year after Glauser's death, the film of 'Thumbprint', the first Sergeant Studer mystery, was greeted with critical acclaim and commercial success. Studer became more famous than his creator, the mark of true success for a fictional detective. Glauser's elegant prose and acute observation conjure up a world of those at the margins of society. His Sergeant Studer novels have ensured his place as a cult figure in Europe.

An online blog on Friedrich Glauser looks at what makes him so special, even today:

Glauser wrote six detective stories, five of them featuring Sergeant Jacob Studer of Bern police. The novels are modelled on the Commissaire Maigret stories by Georges Simenon, as the author freely admitted. Not the criminal case as such is the main issue but the people and the atmosphere in which they move. Both Maigret and Studer are petit-bourgeois, in both cases the whole personality does the investigation, not just the intellect and both are very different from their authors .

He wrote 'anti-detective fiction' - creating a sort of Atmosphere of Malaise:

Friedrich Glauser's Motto regiert (1936) tells a story with parabolic qualities: Sergeant Studer must investigate a murder that has taken place in a Swiss psychiatric clinic. The social and political issues that are roiling Europe in the years leading up to World War Two find condensed expression in this microcosm. The essay focuses on the literary devices the text employs to create atmosphere and asks how atmosphere functions both to support the construction of a classic murder mystery, while also subverting some of its generic conventions. The figure of the detective is of central importance, as he is portrayed as uncommonly sensitive to the atmosphere of his surroundings. At the same time, however, the clinic's atmosphere ultimately proves to some extent unreadable. Hence, Glauser's text can be viewed as a precursor of the what in post-war literature will come to be known as anti-detective fiction.

His English translator tells more about Glauser's sensitivity:

What particularly attracts me about Glauser’s crime novels is the way his detective — Sergeant Studer — understands and sympathises with the disadvantaged, even if his job means he has to continue to investigate them. There is a profound sense of humanity permeating Glauser’s writing, which at the same time throws a keen light on social conditions in Switzerland in the 1930s, but coming across as a concern for individuals rather than as a political message.

Here's a taste from his English translator: "From "Fever"" by Friedrich Glauser at Words Without Borders

So, yes, there's more to detective fiction than the plot...

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what are the issues in the esl industry?

It's difficult to tell how the English as a Second Language market is going.

Some would say there is a growing demand for ESL teachers in the global market:

The English language training (ELT) market is anticipated to expand substantially in the years ahead, reaching a value of $107.93 billion by 2028. With the increasing prominence of English as the medium of international communication, businesses, governments, and educational institutions in non-English speaking countries are acknowledging the necessity of strong English language skills. Consequently, there is a huge increase in the demand for English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers worldwide.

However, others are saying that the Golden Age of ESL has ended:

There was a time when Japan and Taiwan paid very well for English teachers, with Korea and China taking over as economies shifted. In the middle east I worked with guys who started in the 60s and 70s in Africa, and also guys who moved into eastern Europe after the cold war. 

Now, though, with online teaching fully arrived (if not living up to high standards), AI around the corner, markets saturated with more people willing to go overseas to escape hardships, and less jobs in most of the previously stong Asian markets, seems the end of an era.

And now, following on from the surge during the pandemic, some are talking about the death of ESL online teaching:

The final blow came in 2021, when China implemented a ban on online teaching and introduced stringent regulations governing private tutoring services.

However, that comment was from two years ago - and much interpretation of the ESL landscape is quite persona,

Here's a very lively discussion thread on the problem with the ESL industry, which starts like this:

The lifestyle is too good to be able to resettle at home. Nowhere else have I been able to work 25 hours a week (total), met so many outgoing and social people, travelled as much, and seen so many interesting things.

I went home during the pandemic and life just feels dull. I work full time but have less disposable cash. My friends are more restricted anddont say yes to life as much. And here the roads are safe but dull. I think I'm going to have to go back into the esl life. I swore I'd give it up at 30 but I'm just not prepared to give this lifestyle up.

Anyone else in the same boat and just feels life is dull living in your home nation?

Here's more from Reddit on your opinion on ESL trap.

To finish with another perspective on what happens in the classroom, here's a look at the intrinsic issues in the ESL industry

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translanguaging

The idea and practice of translanguaging is basically the practice of using two languages in the same lesson, which differs from many previous methods of bilingual education that tried to separate languages by class, time, or day

So, What Is Translanguaging and How Is It Used in the Classroom?

In translanguaging, students are able to think in multiple languages simultaneously and use their home language as a vehicle to learn academic English.

A student could be reading an article about the solar system in English, but in their brain, they are also thinking and making connections in Spanish. They might annotate in Spanish or first write down reading comprehension responses in Spanish and then figure out how to provide the responses in English, said Marrero-Colon.

It’s all about encouraging students to access their full linguistic repertoires, said Emily Phillips Galloway, an assistant professor at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University.

From the perspective of the ESL/ESOL/EAL world, here's an answer to the question What is translanguaging?

Picture the scene: two students are sitting together, working intently on a handout. They have different first languages but some shared knowledge of the words and phrases of each other’s languages, so they are moving in and out of English to get their message across. Another two students are sitting together nearby. Both of them are Spanish speakers, but are very strong in English and often use it as their main language. At other times, as now, they blend Spanish and English together.

Are either of these examples of translanguaging? In both cases, yes. The young people are using resources from different languages together, with very little regard for what we might call the ‘boundaries’ of named languages such as ‘Spanish’ or ‘English’. They are using elements of each language together to communicate more effectively. This is translanguaging: it’s about using the all your language resources to communicate.

Finally, here's an academic piece looking at Translanguaging and emotionality of English as a second language (ESL) teachers:

Often there is a notable gap between expected emotions or ‘emotional rules’ in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms and genuine emotions which results in ‘emotional labour’ for ESL teachers... The study revealed complex and conflicting teacher emotions around translanguaging including pride, comfort (related to feelings of safety), shame (related to linguistic inferiority complexes), guilt, and frustration.

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the japanese idea of 'ikigai' and the tiktok trend of 'hopecore'

In a very readable and refreshing piece  Young & Meaningful, the Japanese-American high school student Elise Mayumi Beal notes a Japanese philosophy of finding pleasure in the small things, and matches it with an online trend.

And she takes a look at and compares these two ideas:

‘Hopecore’, as its name suggests, is an aesthetic focusing on hope. Often while scrolling through the hopecore hashtag, one will find simplistic pictures, say, of rabbits asleep in fields, accompanied by inspirational quotes like “Lovely things come and go, but they come” scrawled atop the image. “Slow down. Appreciate the little things” now appears on a glowing screen amidst the mess of online content. Following this advice, one might pause and take a break from the endless scrolling…

The intention of such posts is to get the audience to appreciate the little things, to pause and feel the warm feeling that rabbits in fields and words of affirmation give us. Hopecore centers on humanity and positivity, often focusing on everyday interactions, and on romanticizing the little things: the way sunlight filters through the window, or the smell of coffee on a rainy day, for instance...

[Snow on Ayase River Shōtei Takahashi 1915]

Basically, ‘finding’ ikigai isn’t something grand and monumental, but rather consists of many, many little moments that each make you appreciate life. The idea is that it is from this appreciation that purpose is born. It is from this latter, traditional definition that we can draw similarities with hopecore. In essence, both ikigai and hopecore are simple: The little things make life worth living.

Understanding hopecore’s similarities with ikigai, and recognizing its birth from a place of psychological instability, gives us a unique perspective on the younger generation and how we deal with complex topics. Being exposed to so much online content with negative existential undercurrents has changed the way my peers and I perceive life, but it’s being combated with yet more online content, now utilized in a positive way, in the form of hopecore and other trends, to offer purpose and structure at a time when it’s direly needed. Sparked by the nihilism caused by echo chambers of bad news, hopecore is a stand against the bad in the world, and is one of the younger generation’s unique ways of countering the nihilism to which we’re so often exposed...

However much society and culture changes with time, I am confident in one thing: humanity’s unyielding hope. There has always been hope, manifesting in billions of ways among billions of people: by drawing horses and other animals on cave walls, in the hope that the day’s hunt would be bountiful; burying a king beneath a vast pyramid of stone in the hope that he may go to a place of eternal happiness; putting a post on the internet in the hope that others may stumble upon it and begin to dream again; and, creating a philosophy to appreciate the mundane in the hope that this will grant you meaning.

The Japanese government gives us a definition of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life: 

The Japanese word ikigai, which has recently gained attention worldwide and enjoys widespread use, refers to a passion that gives value and joy to life. The author who prompted its craze speaks about the word’s appeal and the effects it has on mental and physical health.

And in a piece last year, the Independent asked: What is TikTok’s new ‘hopecore’ trend and is it exactly what we need right now? 

“I don’t think there will be a decline in usage of social media any time soon, but what people can do is start filling their feeds with things that inspire them to reconnect, re-ignite a spark of hope, and remind them that no matter how overwhelming other things in life may be, there is a whole world of beauty around them – to access it, they need only choose to look.”

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practising your english speaking with chatgpt

Whilst integrating IT into teaching, learning, and assessment will require careful consideration, we will be using AI more an more in language acquisition.

For example, there has been a lot of research into the use of Chat GPT in teaching/learning/working with English. And on a practical level, we can ask AI if they can give me a lesson plan!

Finally, whilst language is indeed a human thing, we are increasingly able to have pretty good 'conversations' with AI bots.

As the AI Overview on Google suggests:

To interact with ChatGPT, you can type your prompts into the text box or use the voice conversation feature. On the mobile app, you can find the microphone icon to speak your prompts. On the web version, you can enable voice conversations in the settings and use the microphone icon or voice mode button to talk to ChatGPT. 

Here's a breakdown of how to talk to ChatGPT:

1. Using Voice on the Mobile App:

• Open the ChatGPT app and locate the message box. 
• Look for the headphone-shaped icon or the voice waveform icon on the right side of the text box. 
Tap the icon to activate voice input and choose your preferred voice from the available options. 
Start speaking your prompts, and the app will automatically detect the end of your sentences. 
To end the conversation, you can tap the circular button with a cross in the middle of the screen. 

2. Using Voice on the Web:

Go to ChatGPT.com. 
If it's your first time using advanced voice, you may need to grant browser permission to access your microphone. 
Locate the voice icon on the bottom-right of the screen and click on it. 
Choose your preferred voice and begin speaking your prompts. 
You can also use the microphone icon to enter your prompt using voice-to-text. 

3. Typing Prompts:

Regardless of whether you are using the app or the web version, you can always type your prompts into the message box. 
After typing your prompt, press enter or the send button to send it to ChatGPT. 

Key points to remember:

Speak clearly and concisely when using voice input. 
ChatGPT can handle ongoing conversations, so you can refer to previous prompts. 
You can refine your prompts by using follow-up questions or by providing additional context. 
Experiment with different prompts and approaches to find what works best for you. 

how to talk to chatgpt - Google Search

With more suggestions here from Reddit:

Talk to ChatGPT on computer : r/ChatGPTPro

Speaking practice with ChatGPT/AI : r/dreamingspanish

With some video ideas too:

Use the ChatGPT App as an English Practice Partner - YouTube

How to Practice Your English LIVE with ChatGPT - YouTube

How I make ChatGPT my English SPEAKING Partner - YouTube

ChatGPT training to practice English | 2025 - YouTube

Finally, here's the bot itself:

ChatGPT - English Speaking Practice GPT

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what motivates children to learn english?

The latest E L Gazette looks at the latest research from the University of Cambridge:

A new study from Cambridge shows the diverse motivations young people have for learning English, brought to life through a series of drawings by primary school children from around the world.

Cambridge study: Children’s drawings highlight value of learning English - E L Gazette

With thanks to the E L Gazette, you can find out more about the study and what teachers think about the Kids Box course, with a link to more from Cambridge:

💡 Why do children want to learn English?

We asked Primary school children around the globe to show us what motivates them through their own drawings. Their creations show them chatting with friends and family, landing a great job, helping tourists with directions, and even dreaming of life in Paris! 🌍✨

The artwork, drawn by 6-11-year-olds from schools across Italy, Türkiye and Vietnam, has been used to inform a key study from Cambridge on the educational impact of our Kid’s Box New Generation course, a widely recognised course for young English learners. Find out more

Post | LinkedIn

Children’s artwork shows real-world impact of learning English, Cambridge Study

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language is a human thing

Other species can communicate of course - but parrots speaking human languages is in fact only a matter of mimicry, because only humans can use language. 

Other 'minds' can communicate - but whilst there is a lot of promise in AI and the future of education for example, only humans can use language in the way humans do. 

Only humans can do code-switching: jumping between different registers, different voices and different languages. Only humans enjoy word play - and things such as malapropisms, spoonerisms and nonsense words. Humans love ambiguity - and ambiguity is everywhere in Englsh!

The problems around the relationship between language and thought is clearly only something humans are struggling with. It does seem to be, though, that language shapes the way we think, which is not the case with parrots or ChatGPT.

Another issue is that no matter how much 'input' we get when learning a language, there will always be the poverty of the stimulus - in other words, "there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain". 

These are theories of language learning and teaching: of behaviourism vs nativism - and look to theorist Chomsky and language acquisition and what makes us human.

And the latest edition of the Philosophy Now magazine takes a look at this:

Contemporary linguists and philosophers have formalized Descartes’ and Cordemoy’s observations about human linguistic possibility into three conditions:

Stimulus-Freedom: Humans can produce new expressions that lack any one-to-one relationship with their environments. Generally, stimuli in a human’s local environment appear to elicit utterances, but not cause them. If human language use is not affixed in some determinate, predictable fashion to stimuli, then language use is not directly caused by situations. Among other things, this means that meaningful expressions can be generated about environments far-removed from the local context in which the person speaks; or even about imaginary contexts. The contrast with animal communication is striking here. For animals, communication is restricted to the local context of its use. Human language use is, in sharp contrast, detachable: a pillar of the human intellect may be the ability to detach oneself from the circumstances in which cognitive resources are deployed without reliance on stimuli to do so. In other words, we can think for ourselves.

Unboundedness: Human language use is not confined to a pre-sorted list of words, phrases, or sentences (as it is with LLMs). Instead, there’s no fixed set of utterances humans can produce. This is the infinite productivity of human language – the unlimited combination and re-combination of finite elements into new forms that convey new, independent meanings.

Appropriateness to Circumstance: That human language use is stimulus-free can be revealing when we reflect that utterances are routinely appropriate to the situations in which they are made and coherent to others who hear them. If human language use is both stimulus-free and not caused by situations, this means its relation to one’s environment must be the more obscure relation of appropriateness. Indeed, language use “is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation who might have reacted in similar ways and whose thoughts, evoked by this discourse, correspond to those of the speaker” (Language and Problems of Knowledge, Noam Chomsky, 1988).

Only when all three conditions are simultaneously present does language use take on its special human character. As Chomsky summarized it:

“man has a species-specific capacity, a unique type of intellectual organization which cannot be attributed to peripheral organs or related to general intelligence and which manifests itself in what we may refer to as the ‘creative aspect’ of ordinary language use – its property being both unbounded in scope and stimulus-free. Thus Descartes maintains that language is available for the free expression of thought or for appropriate response in any new context and is undetermined by any fixed association of utterances to external stimuli or physiological states (identifiable in any noncircular fashion)”
(Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, 1966).

It is a distinctively human trait to use language in a manner that is simultaneously stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent to others. Such language use is neither determined (by a stimulus) nor random (inappropriate). This ability enables people to deploy their intellectual resources to any problem, or to create new problems altogether, putting our shared cognitive capacities to use across contexts at will. It is little wonder then why Descartes assigns such importance to language use in his test for other minds. A being that uses language in only one or two of the three ways described can be explained in mechanical terms – but the presence of all three is something that modern technology lacks the tools to create.

Rescuing Mind from the Machines | Issue 168 | Philosophy Now

Or, to put it another way:

The article discusses the misconceptions of "AGI doomers" - those who believe that a future artificial general intelligence (AGI) system could rebel against humanity. The author argues that the key flaw in the doomer's argument is their failure to recognize the "creative aspect of language use" (CALU) - the uniquely human ability to use language in a stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate and coherent manner. The author contends that this extra-mechanical nature of human language and cognition is a critical characteristic that current AI systems lack, and that the doomer's assumption of an AGI system spontaneously developing such capabilities is unfounded.

What the AGI Doomers Misunderstand - Aili

This is quite a debate:

Do large language models (LLMs) use language creatively? Ample intellectual content has been produced recently over whether LLMs generate text sufficiently novel to be considered “creative” or merely synthesize creatively human-generated content without a distinctive contribution of their own. It is one dimension of a highly complex debate that is unfolding over the nature of both LLMs and human intelligence.

This saga has seen contributions from thinkers in a diversity of disciplines, including computer science, robotics, cognitive science, philosophy, and even national security. A notable flashpoint is linguist Noam Chomsky’s fiery critique of ChatGPT and LLMs in The New York Times. This controversial piece illuminates stark divides between scientific approaches to the nature of the human mind, natural and artificial intelligence (AI), and how engineering makes use (or doesn’t) of these notions.

Chomsky’s NYT piece spurred tremendous debates on this subject, as he highlighted his belief that “Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism.” The discourse which has sprung up in the wake of this and other pieces surrounds familiar arguments about the utility of generative linguistics, the role of cognitive science in AI, and even broader matters such as the emergent theory of mind capabilities in LLMs.

I find myself frustrated and baffled. This is good because otherwise, I may not have written this article. But the reasons are not stellar: Chomsky’s rigid communication style has prevented him from leveraging some of the fascinating features of his own linguistic work in a direct and explicit manner to assess LLMs’ capabilities. Conversely, machine learning researchers have so thoroughly indulged in the euphoria of the field’s recent (and real) advancements that they frequently lack the will required to assess whether human cognition is as straightforward as it seems.

I attempt to remedy this here. Where Chomsky’s approach to the mind and the tradition of generative linguistics broadly are brought into AI, they have focused intensely on familiar arguments like the poverty of the stimulus and the innateness of linguistic knowledge or principles. I instead highlight what is known in the rationalist tradition in philosophy and cognitive science as the “creative aspect of language use,” or CALU.

Do Large Language Models Have Minds Like Ours? | Towards AI

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to what extent does your class determine what you do with your life?

Class is a funny thing:

Jay Doubleyou: learning to use the appropriate register @ fawlty towers

Class is also a very serious thing:

Jay Doubleyou: america and class

Jay Doubleyou: class is the big issue in the united kingdom: part three

Jay Doubleyou: bad service is a class issue in the uk

To what extent, then, does class determine what you do with your life? And there's a lot of academic study on this:

How social class is reflected in our Psychology | BPS

The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour - PMC

If we look at how many working class people make a career in 'the arts' (painting, theatre, cinema, writing), then that's quite something:

Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society | Culture | The Guardian

Working class creatives at ‘lowest level in a decade’ | Equity

Class inequality in the Creative Industries is rooted in unequal access to arts and cultural education - Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre

Nevertheless, some creative people do make it - and the story of one such painter has just been told on BBC radio:

BBC Sounds - The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker - Available Episodes

The story has really captured the art world:

The Secret Painter — Eric Tucker, the unknown artist compared to Lowry

The extraordinary story of the secret painter discovered in his eighties

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker review – art for art’s sake | Autobiography and memoir | The Guardian

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